A Few Thoughts

It's been quite awhile since I posted last. I intended to post regularly, but that's proven harder than I expected. Who knew a 3-year-old would consume so much of my time?
But, I'll try again to post more regularly. We'll see how that goes.
For now, just a few thoughts on this beautiful early Fall morning:

• The fact that the Mariners have decided to not pitch Felix Hernandez in the season-finale Sunday is the perfect stupid ending to a perfectly stupid season. What, now you're going to protect him from injury? Now? The point of sitting a guy down is to protect him from injury so you can use him in games that are meaningful. Well, the Mariners haven't had a meaningful game in, what, a month? Two months? Why didn't they sit him down then? But now, they're going to rescue him from another seven innings? Give me a break. It's almost enough to turn me off of the Mariners. But I'll be back in April, believing 2011 is the year they win it all. And you watch, Felix will blow out his arm in Spring Training and they'll go on and win the World Series with Doug Fister and Luke French leading the way. That'll make this decision look even more stupid. Stupid Mariners.
• Typically, I dislike women's basketball. It has nothing to do with being sexist, I have no issue at all with women playing sports. I don't like hockey or golf or auto racing either. I just have, in the past, found the product not entertaining at all. I do think that there are very good women basketball players. I used to really like watching the University of Washington women's games, back when Chris Gobrecht coached them and they were actually more successful than the UW men. Here's what I think my issue is: You can have a couple of bad men's teams playing and it can still be reasonably entertaining. You'll usually see a dunk or two, some generally entertaining moments. With a women's game, for me, you need two good teams for it to equal an entertaining game. One bad team can completely ruin the product because it will be so laughably one-sided and ugly that it makes you cringe. So, what's my point? I recently covered the Seattle Storm for the Tacoma News Tribune. Prior to that, I had paid very little attention to the WNBA. I just didn't care. I was aware the Storm was good year after year, that Lauren Jackson and Sue Bird were both good players. I just didn't care. But after covering them on their run to the WNBA title, they won me over. The quality of play was high and the atmosphere at KeyArena was as loud as I've been around. I mean, uncomfortably loud. I could still do without a lot of the ridiculous crowd-involvement things like the Stanky Dance, the conga line thing and the incredibly loud music, but that's true of a lot of sports. I will say that the Storm and Sounders do a great job engaging the fans, which I think is awesome. So, will I regularly follow the WNBA next season? No, probably not. But I also won't quickly turn away from a game when I see one, and I wouldn't mind going to a few games next season. It was the first time I actually had fun at a women's basketball game in a long, long time, so bravo Storm.
• I'm getting the feeling the Husky football team isn't going to a bowl game. I know, it's early. But yikes, can anyone here tackle? I don't blame the coach entirely, but Nick Holt is one of the highest paid assistant coaches in the country. Why can't his defense tackle? And it's not just the defense. I covered Jake Locker when he was a freshman at Ferndale High School. I've followed him since then. I've never seen him look worse than he did against Nebraska in any sport. It was shocking. Yes, he got bad blocking. But he's supposed to be one of the top five players in the country, and he completely tanked. And I hate that, because he's such a good guy, I want him to succeed. And I know he will. But wow was that bad. The Pac-10 is turning out to be a lot more competitive than we expected and I'm trying to add up Washington wins, but each time I try, I never come out with enough to send it to a bowl game. And what a disaster that would be.
• About a month ago we went to see the Sounders play the Chicago Fire and got to sit in the Nordstrom's suite. My aunt works for the Nordstroms (and I don't mean selling shoes) so now and then we get to take advantage of that. We've gotten their Diamond Club seats at Mariner games. We've gotten to use their summer house on one of the islands for a birthday. And when I say summer house, I mean summer compound, where there are like three different huge, ridiculously beautiful houses right on the water. We've gotten to watch July 4th fireworks from their downtown condo which is so big, I actually got lost walking around in it. ...seriously. So, the point is, we've been pretty lucky that my aunt has that connection. And watching a game from a suite is both fun and hard. Why hard? Because you get used to it, and soon (kinda like the Diamond Club), you don't want to watch a game from anywhere else. Free food and drinks, perfect, comfortable seats, free parking, and the ushers definitely treat you differently. I kept thinking, wait, you don't understand, I'm not a Nordstrom, you don't have to pretend I'm important. I knew it was a different world when, as we entered the stadium, we ran into Sounders majority owner Joe Roth, who used to be in charge of Disney. We don't see him much in the cheap seats. On the way out, we walked right next to Drew Carey (who looks really weird skinny) and, right behind him, Ryan Stiles. They were talking about going out after the game but both decided that they had to work in the morning so they wouldn't. My guess is their work was different from our work. Anyway, we're going to see the Sounders against Chivas of Guadalajara in a couple weeks and watching from the suite. I'll try to post something more extensive about that then.
• Alright, that's all I've got for now. This is long enough. But I'll try to update again sometime.